Beyond the Black River Again
By Roberta E. Howard
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Roberta E. Howard
A Conyn the Barbarian story.
A Gender Switch Adventure.
Chapter 1. Conyn Loses Her Ax
The stillness of the forest trail was so primeval that the tread of a soft-booted foot was a startling disturbance. At least it seemed so to the ears of the wayfarer, though she was moving along the path with the caution that must be practised by any woman who ventures beyond Thunder River. She was a young woman of medium height, with an open countenance and a mop of tousled tawny hair unconfined by cap or helmet. Her garb was common enough for that country--a coarse tunic, belted at the waist, short leather breeches beneath, and soft buckskin boots that came short of the knee. A knife-hilt jutted from one boot-top. The broad leather belt supported a short, heavy sword and a buckskin pouch. There was no perturbation in the wide eyes that scanned the green walls which fringed the trail. Though not tall, she was well built, and the arms that the short wide sleeves of the tunic left bare were thick with corded muscle.
She tramped imperturbably along, although the last settler's cabin lay miles behind her, and each step was carrying her nearer the grim peril that hung like a brooding shadow over the ancient forest.
She was not making as much noise as it seemed to her, though she well knew that the faint tread of her booted feet would be like a tocsin of alarm to the fierce ears that might be lurking in the treacherous green fastness. Her careless attitude was not genuine; her eyes and ears were keenly alert, especially her ears, for no gaze could penetrate the leafy tangle for more than a few feet in either direction.
But it was instinct more than any warning by the external senses which brought her up suddenly, her hand on her hilt. She stood stock-still in the middle of the trail, unconsciously holding her breath, wondering what she had heard, and wondering if indeed she had heard anything. The silence seemed absolute. Not a squirrel chattered or bird chirped. Then her gaze fixed itself on a mass of bushes beside the trail a few yards ahead of her. There was no breeze, yet she had seen a branch quiver. The short hairs on her scalp prickled, and she stood for an instant undecided, certain that a move in either direction would bring death streaking at her from the bushes.
A heavy chopping crunch sounded behind the leaves. The bushes were shaken violently, and simultaneously with the sound, an arrow arched erratically from among them and vanished among the trees along the trail. The wayfarer glimpsed its flight as she sprang frantically to cover.
Crouching behind a thick stem, her sword quivering in her fingers, she saw the bushes part, and a tall figure stepped leisurely into the trail. The traveller stared in surprise. The stranger was clad like herself in regard to boots and breeks, though the latter were of silk instead of leather. But she wore a sleeveless hauberk of dark mesh-mail in place of a tunic, and a helmet perched on her black mane. That helmet held the other's gaze; it was without a crest, but adorned by short bull's horns. No civilized hand ever forged that head-piece. Nor was the face below it that of a civilized woman: dark, scarred, with smoldering blue eyes, it was a face as untamed as the primordial forest which formed its background. The woman held a broad-sword in her right hand, and the edge was smeared with crimson.
"Come on out," she called, in an accent unfamiliar to the wayfarer. "All's safe now. There was only one of the dogs. Come on out."
The other emerged dubiously and stared at the stranger. She felt curiously helpless and futile as she gazed on the proportions of the forest man--the massive iron-clad breast, and the arm that bore the reddened sword, burned dark by the sun and ridged and corded with muscles. She moved with the dangerous ease of a panther; she was too fiercely supple to be a product of civilization, even of that fringe of civilization which composed the outer frontiers.
Turning, she stepped back to the hushes and pulled them apart. Still not certain just what had happened, the wayfarer from the east advanced and stared down into the bushes. A woman lay there, a short, dark, thickly-muscled woman, naked except for a loin-cloth, a necklace of human teeth and a brass armlet. A short sword was thrust into the girdle of the loin-cloth, and one hand still gripped a heavy black bow. The woman had long black hair; that was about all the wayfarer could tell about her head, for her features were a mask of blood and brains. Her skull had been split to the teeth.
"A Pict, by the gods!" exclaimed the wayfarer.
The burning blue eyes turned upon her.
"Are you surprised?"
"Why, they told me at Velitrium, and again at the settlers' cabins along the road, that these devils sometimes sneaked across the border, but I didn't expect to meet one this far in the interior."
"You're only four miles east of Black River," the stranger informed her. "They've been shot within a mile of Velitrium. No settler between Thunder River and Fort Tuscelan is really safe. I picked up this dog's trail three miles south of the fort this morning, and I've been following her ever since. I came up behind her just as she was drawing an arrow on you. Another instant and there'd have been a stranger in Hell. But I spoiled her aim for her."
The wayfarer was staring wide eyed at the larger woman, dumbfounded by the realization that the woman had actually tracked down one of the forest devils and slain her unsuspected. That implied woodsmanship of a quality undreamed, even for Conajohara.
"You are one of the fort's garrison?" she asked.
"I'm no soldier. I draw the pay and rations of an officer of the line, but I do my work in the woods. Valannus knows I'm of more use ranging along the river than cooped up in the fort."
Casually the slayer shoved the body deeper into the thickets with her foot, pulled the bushes together and turned away down the trail. The other followed her.
"My name is Balthusa," she offered. "I was at Velitrium last night. I haven't decided whether I'll take up a hide of land, or enter fort service."
"The best land near Thunder River is already taken," grunted the slayer. "Plenty of good land between Scalp Creek--you crossed it a few miles back--and the fort, but that's getting too devilish close to the river. The Picts steal over to burn and murder--as that one did. They don't always come singly. Some day they'll try to sweep the settlers out of Conajohara. And they may succeed--probably will succeed. This colonization business is mad, anyway. There's plenty of good land east of the Bossonian marches. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn't have to cross the border and take the land of the Picts away from them."
"That's queer talk from a woman in the service of the governor of Conajohara," objected Balthusa.
"It's nothing to me," the other retorted. "I'm a mercenary. I sell my sword to the highest bidder. I never planted wheat and never will, so long as there are other harvests to be reaped with the sword. But you Hyborians have expanded as far as you'll be allowed to expand. You've crossed the marches, burned a few villages, exterminated a few clans and pushed back the frontier to Black River; but I doubt if you'll even be able to hold what you've conquered, and you'll never push the frontier any further westward. Your idiotic queen doesn't understand conditions here. She won't send you enough reinforcements, and there are not enough settlers to withstand the shock of a concerted attack from across the river."
"But the Picts are divided into small clans," persisted Balthusa. "They'll never unite. We can whip any single clan."
"Or any three or four clans," admitted the slayer. "But some day a woman will rise and unite thirty or forty clans, just as was done among the Cimmerians, when the Gunderwomen tried to push the border northward, years ago. They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium--you've heard the tale."
"So I have indeed," replied Balthusa, wincing. The memory of that red disaster was a black blot in the chronicles of a proud and warlike people. "My uncle was at Venarium when the Cimmerians swarmed over the walls. She was one of the few who escaped that slaughter. I've heard her tell the tale, many a time. The barbarians swept out of the hills in a ravening horde, without warning, and stormed Venarium with such fury none could stand before them. Women, men, and children were butchered. Venarium was reduced to a mass of charred ruins, as it is to this day. The Aquilonians were driven back across the marches, and have never since tried to colonize the Cimmerian country. But you speak of Venarium familiarly. Perhaps you were there?"
"I was," grunted the other. "I was one of the horde that swarmed over the walls. I hadn't yet seen fifteen snows, but already my name was repeated about the council fires."
Balthusa involuntarily recoiled, staring. It seemed incredible that the woman walking tranquilly at her side should have been one of those screeching, blood-mad devils that poured over the walls of Venarium on that long-gone day to make his streets run crimson.
"Then you, too, are a barbarian!" she exclaimed involuntarily.
The other nodded, without taking offense.
"I am Conyn, a Cimmerian."
"I've heard of you." Fresh interest quickened Balthusa' gaze. No wonder the Pict had fallen victim to her own sort of subtlety! The Cimmerians were barbarians as ferocious as the Picts, and much more intelligent. Evidently Conyn had spent much time among civilized women, though that contact had obviously not softened her, nor weakened any of her primitive instincts. Balthusa' apprehension turned to admiration as she marked the easy catlike stride, the effortless silence with which the Cimmerian moved along the trail. The oiled links of her armor did not clink, and Balthusa knew Conyn could glide through the deepest thicket or most tangled copse as noiselessly as any naked Pict that ever lived.
"You're not a Gunderwoman?" It was more assertion than question.
Balthusa shook her head. "I'm from the Tauran."
"I've seen good woodsmen from the Tauran. But the Bossonians have sheltered you Aquilonians from the outer wilderness for too many centuries. You need hardening."
That was true; the Bossonian marches, with their fortifed villages filled with determined bowmen, had long served Aquilonia as a buffer against the outlying barbarians. Now among the settlers beyond Thunder River here was growing up a breed of forest women capable of meeting the barbarians at their own game, but their numbers were still scanty. Most of the frontiersmen were like Balthusa--more of the settler than the woodsman type.
The sun had not set, but it was no longer in sight, hidden as it was behind the dense forest wall. The shadows were lengthening, deepening back in the woods as the companions strode on down the trail.
"It will be dark before we reach the fort," commented Conyn casually; then: "Listen!"
She stopped short, half crouching, sword ready, transformed into a savage figure of suspicion and menace, poised to spring and rend. Balthusa had heard it too--a wild scream that broke at its highest note. It was the cry of a woman in dire fear or agony.
Conyn was off in an instant, racing down the trail, each stride widening the distance between her and her straining companion. Balthusa puffed a curse. Among the settlements of the Tauran she was accounted a good runner, but Conyn was leaving her behind with maddening ease. Then Balthusa forgot her exasperation as her ears were outraged by the most frightful cry she had ever heard. It was not human, this one; it was a demoniacal caterwauling of hideous triumph that seemed to exult over fallen humanity and find echo in black gulfs beyond human ken.
Balthusa faltered in her stride, and clammy sweat beaded her flesh. But Conyn did not hesitate; she darted around a bend in the trail and disappeared, and Balthusa, panicky at finding herself alone with that awful scream still shuddering through the forest in grisly echoes, put on an extra burst of speed and plunged after her.
The Aquilonian slid to a stumbling halt, almost colliding with the Cimmerian who stood in the trail over a crumpled body. But Conyn was not looking at the corpse which lay there in the crimson-soaked dust. She was glaring into the deep woods on either side of the trail.
Balthusa muttered a horrified oath. It was the body of a woman which lay there in the trail, a short, fat woman, clad in the gilt-worked boots and (despite the heat) the ermine-trimmed tunic of a wealthy merchant. Her fat, pale face was set in a stare of frozen horror; her thick throat had been slashed from ear to ear as if by a razor-sharp blade. The short sword still in its scabbard seemed to indicate that she had been struck down without a chance to fight for her life.
"A Pict?" Balthusa whispered, as she turned to peer into the deepening shadows of the forest.
Conyn shook her head and straightened to scowl down at the dead woman.
"A forest devil. This is the fifth, by Crom!"
"What do you mean?"
"Did you ever hear of a Pictish wizard called Zogara Sag?"
Balthusa shook her head uneasily.
"She dwells in Gwawela, the nearest village across the river. Three months ago she hid beside this road and stole a string of pack-mules from a pack-train bound for the fort--drugged their drivers, somehow. The mules belonged to this man"--Conyn casually indicated the corpse with her foot--"Tiberias, a merchant of Velitrium. They were loaded with ale-kegs, and old Zogara stopped to guzzle before she got across the river. A woodsman named Soractus trailed her, and led Valannus and three soldiers to where she lay dead drunk in a thicket. At the importunities of Tiberias, Valannus threw Zogara Sag into a cell, which is the worst insult you can give a Pict. She managed to kill her guard and escape, and sent back word that she meant to kill Tiberias and the five women who captured her in a way that would make Aquilonians shudder for centuries to come.
"Well, Soractus and the soldiers are dead. Soractus was killed on the river, the soldiers in the very shadow of the fort. And now Tiberias is dead. No Pict killed any of them. Each victim--except Tiberias, as you see--lacked her head--which no doubt is now ornamenting the altar of Zogara Sag's particular god."
"How do you know they weren't killed by the Picts?" demanded Balthusa.
Conyn pointed to the corpse of the merchant.
"You think that was done with a knife or a sword? Look closer and you'll see that only a talon could have made a gash like that. The flesh is ripped, not cut."
"Perhaps a panther--" began Balthusa, without conviction.
Conyn shook her head impatiently.
"A woman from the Tauran couldn't mistake the mark of a panther's claws. No. It's a forest devil summoned by Zogara Sag to carry out her revenge. Tiberias was a fool to start for Velitrium alone, and so close to dusk. But each one of the victims seemed to be smitten with madness just before doom overtook her. Look here; the signs are plain enough. Tiberias came riding along the trail on her mule, maybe with a bundle of choice otter pelts behind her saddle to sell in Velitrium, and the thing sprang on her from behind that bush. See where the branches are crushed down.
"Tiberias gave one scream, and then her throat was torn open and she was selling her otter skins in Hell. The mule ran away into the woods. Listen! Even now you can hear her thrashing about under the trees. The demon didn't have time to take Tiberias' head; it took fright as we came up."
"As you came up," amended Balthusa. "It must not be a very terrible creature if it flees from one armed woman. But how do you know it was not a Pict with some kind of a hook that rips instead of slicing? Did you see it?"
"Tiberias was an armed woman," grunted Conyn. "If Zogara Sag can bring demons to aid her, she can tell them which women to kill and which to let alone. No, I didn't see it. I only saw the bushes shake as it left the trail. But if you want further proof, look here!"
The slayer had stepped into the pool of blood in which the dead woman sprawled. Under the bushes at the edge of the path there was a footprint, made in blood on the hard loam.
"Did a woman make that?" demanded Conyn.
Balthusa felt her scalp prickle. Neither woman nor any beast that she had ever seen could have left that strange, monstrous, three-toed print, that was curiously combined of the bird and the reptile, yet a true type of neither. She spread her fingers above the print, careful not to touch it, and grunted explosively. She could not span the mark.
"What is it?" she whispered. "I never saw a beast that left a spoor like that."
"Nor any other sane woman," answered Conyn grimly. "It's a swamp demon--they're thick as bats in the swamps beyond Black River. You can hear them howling like damned souls when the wind blows strong from the south on hot nights."
"What shall we do?" asked the Aquilonian, peering uneasily into the deep blue shadows. The frozen fear on the dead countenance haunted her. She wondered what hideous head the wretch had seen thrust grinning from among the leaves to chill her blood with terror.
"No use to try to follow a demon," grunted Conyn, drawing a short woodman's ax from her girdle. "I tried tracking her after she killed Soractus. I lost her trail within a dozen steps. She might have grown herself wings and flown away, or sunk down through the earth to Hell. I don't know. I'm not going after the mule, either. It'll either wander back to the fort, or to some settler's cabin."
As she spoke Conyn was busy at the edge of the trail with her ax. With a few strokes she cut a pair of saplings nine or ten feet long, and denuded them of their branches. Then she cut a length from a serpent-like vine that crawled among the bushes near by, and making one end fast to one of the poles, a couple of feet from the end, whipped the vine over the other sapling and interlaced it back and forth. In a few moments she had a crude but strong litter.
"The demon isn't going to get Tiberias' head if I can help it," she growled. "We'll carry the body into the fort. It isn't more than three miles. I never liked the fat fool, but we can't have Pictish devils making so cursed free with white women's heads."
The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border women never spoke of them as such.
Balthusa took the rear end of the litter, onto which Conyn unceremoniously dumped the unfortunate merchant, and they moved on down the trail as swiftly as possible. Conyn made no more noise laden with their grim burden than she had made when unencumbered. She had made a loop with the merchant's belt at the end of the poles, and was carrying her share of the load with one hand, while the other gripped her naked broadsword, and her restless gaze roved the sinister walls about them. The shadows were thickening. A darkening blue mist blurred the outlines of the foliage. The forest deepened in the twilight, became a blue haunt of mystery sheltering unguessed things.
They had covered more than a mile, and the muscles in Balthusa' sturdy arms were beginning to ache a little, when a cry rang shuddering from the woods whose blue shadows were deepening into purple.
Conyn started convulsively, and Balthusa almost let go the poles.
"A man!" cried the younger woman. "Great Mitra, a man cried out then!"
"A settler's wife straying in the woods," snarled Conyn, setting down her end of the lifter. "Looking for a cow, probably, and--stay here!"
She dived like a hunting wolf into the leafy wall. Balthusa' hair bristled.
"Stay here alone with this corpse and a devil hiding in the woods?" she yelped. "I'm coming with you!"
And suiting action to words, she plunged after the Cimmerian. Conyn glanced back at her, but made no objection, though she did not moderate her pace to accommodate the shorter legs of her companion. Balthusa wasted her wind in swearing as the Cimmerian drew away from her again, like a phantom between the trees, and then Conyn burst into a dim glade and halted crouching, lips snarling, sword lifted.
"What are we stopping for?" panted Balthusa, dashing the sweat out of her eyes and gripping her short sword.
"That scream came from this glade, or near by," answered Conyn. "I don't mistake the location of sounds, even in the woods. But where--"
Abruptly the sound rang out again--behind them; in the direction of the trail they had just quitted. It rose piercingly and pitifully, the cry of a man in frantic terror--and then, shockingly, it changed to a yell of mocking laughter that might have burst from the lips of a fiend of lower Hell.
"What in Mitra's name--" Balthusa' face was a pale blur in the gloom.
With a scorching oath Conyn wheeled and dashed back the way she had come, and the Aquilonian stumbled bewilderedly after her. She blundered into the Cimmerian as the latter stopped dead, and rebounded from her brawny shoulders as though from an iron statue. Gasping from the impact, she heard Conyn's breath hiss through her teeth. The Cimmerian seemed frozen in her tracks.
Looking over her shoulder, Balthusa felt her hair stand up stiffly. Something was moving through the deep bushes that fringed the trail--something that neither walked nor flew, but seemed to glide like a serpent. But it was not a serpent. Its outlines were indistinct, but it was taller than a woman, and not very bulky. It gave off a glimmer of weird light, like a faint blue flame. Indeed, the eery fire was the only tangible thing about it. It might have been an embodied flame moving with reason and purpose through the blackening woods.
Conyn snarled a savage curse and hurled her ax with ferocious will. But the thing glided on without altering its course. Indeed it was only a few instants' fleeting glimpse they had of it--a tall, shadowy thing of misty flame floating through the thickets. Then it was gone, and the forest crouched in breathless stillness.
With a snarl Conyn plunged through the intervening foliage and into the trail. Her profanity, as Balthusa floundered after her, was lurid and impassioned. The Cimmerian was standing over the litter on which lay the body of Tiberias. And that body no longer possessed a head.
"Tricked us with its damnable caterwauling!" raved Conyn, swinging her great sword about her head in her wrath. "I might have known! I might have guessed a trick! Now there'll be five heads to decorate Zogara's altar."
"But what thing is it that can cry like a man and laugh like a devil, and shines like witch-fire as it glides through the trees?" gasped Balthusa, mopping the sweat from her pale face.
"A swamp devil," responded Conyn morosely. "Grab those poles. We'll take in the body, anyway. At least our load's a bit lighter."
With which grim philosophy she gripped the leathery loop and stalked down the trail.
Chapter 2. The Wizard of Gwawela
Fort Tuscelan stood on the eastern bank of Black River, the tides of which washed the foot of the stockade. The latter was of logs, as were all the buildings within, including the donjon (to dignify it by that appellation), in which were the governor's quarters, overlooking the stockade and the sullen river. Beyond that river lay a huge forest, which approached jungle-like density along the spongy shores. Women paced the runways along the log parapet day and night, watching that dense green wall. Seldom a menacing figure appeared, but the sentries knew that they too were watched, fiercely, hungrily, with the mercilessness of ancient hate. The forest beyond the river might seem desolate and vacant of life to the ignorant eye, but life teemed there, not alone of bird and beast and reptile, but also of women, the fiercest of all the hunting beasts.
There, at the fort, civilization ended. Fort Tuscelan was the last outpost of a civilized world; it represented the westernmost thrust of the dominant Hyborian races. Beyond the river the primitive still reigned in shadowy forests, brush-thatched huts where hung the grinning skulls of women, and mud-walled enclosures where fires flickered and drums rumbled, and spears were whetted in the hands of dark, silent women with tangled black hair and the eyes of serpents. Those eyes often glared through bushes at the fort across the river. Once dark-skinned women had built their huts where that fort stood, yes, and their huts had risen where now stood the fields and log cabins of fair-haired settlers, back beyond Velitrium, that raw, turbulent frontier town on the banks of Thunder River, to the shores of that other river that bounds the Bossonian marches. Traders had come, and priests of Mitra who walked with bare feet and empty hands, and died horribly, most of them; but soldiers had followed, women with axes in their hands and men and children in ox-drawn wains. Back to Thunder River, and still back, beyond Black River, the aborigines had been pushed, with slaughter and massacre. But the dark-skinned people did not forget that once Conajohara had been theirs.
The guard inside the eastern gate bawled a challenge. Through a barred aperture torchlight flickered, glinting on a steel headpiece and suspicious eyes beneath it.
"Open the gate," snorted Conyn. "You see it's I, don't you?"
Military discipline put her teeth on edge.
The gate swung inward and Conyn and her companion passed through. Balthusa noted that the gate was flanked by a tower on each side, the summits of which rose above the stockade. She saw loopholes for arrows.
The guardswomen grunted as they saw the burden borne between the women. Their pikes jangled against each other as they thrust shut the gate, chin on shoulder, and Conyn asked testily: "Have you never seen a headless body before?"
The faces of the soldiers were pallid in the torchlight.
"That's Tiberias," blurted one. "I recognize that fur-trimmed tunic. Valerius here owes me five lunas. I told her Tiberias had heard the loon call when she rode through the gate on her mule, with her glassy stare. I wagered she'd come back without her head."
Conyn grunted enigmatically, motioned Balthusa to ease the litter to the ground, and then strode off toward the governor's quarters, with the Aquilonian at her heels. The tousle-headed youth stared about her eagerly and curiously, noting the rows of barracks along the walls, the stables, the tiny merchants' stalls, the towering blockhouse, and the other buildings, with the open square in the middle where the soldiers drilled, and where, now, fires danced and women off duty lounged. These were now hurrying to join the morbid crowd gathered about the litter at the gate. The rangy figures of Aquilonian pikemen and forest runners mingled with the shorter, stockier forms of Bossonian archers.
She was not greatly surprised that the governor received them herself. Autocratic society with its rigid caste laws lay east of the marches. Valannus was still a young woman, well knit, with a finely chiseled countenance already carved into sober cast by toil and responsibility.
"You left the fort before daybreak, I was told," she said to Conyn. "I had begun to fear that the Picts had caught you at last."
"When they smoke my head the whole river will know," grunted Conyn. "They'll hear Pictish men wailing their dead as far as Velitrium--I was on a lone scout. I couldn't sleep. I kept hearing drums talking across the river."
"They talk each night," reminded the governor, her fine eyes shadowed, as she stared closely at Conyn. She had learned the unwisdom of discounting wild women's instincts.
"There was a difference last night," growled Conyn. "There has been ever since Zogara Sag got back across the river."
"We should either have given her presents and sent her home, or else hanged her," sighed the governor. "You advised that, but--"
"But it's hard for you Hyborians to learn the ways of the outlands," said Conyn. "Well, it can't be helped now, but there'll be no peace on the border so long as Zogara lives and remembers the cell she sweated in. I was following a warrior who slipped over to put a few white notches on her bow. After I split her head I fell in with this lass whose name is Balthusa and who's come from the Tauran to help hold the frontier."
Valannus approvingly eyed the young woman's frank countenance and strongly-knit frame.
"I am glad to welcome you, young sir. I wish more of your people would come. We need women used to forest life. Many of our soldiers and some of our settlers are from the eastern provinces and know nothing of woodcraft, or even of agricultural life."
"Not many of that breed this side of Velitrium," grunted Conyn. "That town's full of them, though. But listen, Valannus, we found Tiberias dead on the trail." And in a few words she related the grisly affair.
Valannus paled. "I did not know she had left the fort. She must have been mad!"
"She was," answered Conyn. "Like the other four; each one, when her time came, went mad and rushed into the woods to meet her death like a hare running down the throat of a python. Something called to them from the deeps of the forest, something the women call a loon, for lack of a better name, but only the doomed ones could hear it. Zogara Sag has made a magic that Aquilonian civilization can't overcome."
To this thrust Valannus made no reply; she wiped her brow with a shaky hand.
"Do the soldiers know of this?"
"We left the body by the eastern gate."
"You should have concealed the fact, hidden the corpse somewhere in the woods. The soldiers are nervous enough already."
"They'd have found it out some way. If I'd hidden the body, it would have been returned to the fort as the corpse of Soractus was--tied up outside the gate for the women to find in the morning."
Valannus shuddered. Turning, she walked to a casement and stared silently out over the river, black and shiny under the glint of the stars. Beyond the river the jungle rose like an ebony wall. The distant screech of a panther broke the stillness. The night pressed in, blurring the sounds of the soldiers outside the blockhouse, dimming the fires. A wind whispered through the black branches, rippling the dusky water. On its wings came a low, rhythmic pulsing, sinister as the pad of a leopard's foot.
"After all," said Valannus, as if speaking her thoughts aloud, "what do we know--what does anyone know--of the things that jungle may hide? We have dim rumors of great swamps and rivers, and a forest that stretches on and on over everlasting plains and hills to end at last on the shores of the western ocean. But what things lie between this river and that ocean we dare not even guess. No white woman has ever plunged deep into that fastness and returned alive to tell us what be found. We are wise in our civilized knowledge, but our knowledge extends just so far--to the western bank of that ancient river! Who knows what shapes earthly and unearthly may lurk beyond the dim circle of light our knowledge has cast?
"Who knows what gods are worshipped under the shadows of that heathen forest, or what devils crawl out of the black ooze of the swamps? Who can be sure that all the inhabitants of that black country are natural? Zogara Sag--a sage of the eastern cities would sneer at her primitive magic-making as the mummery of a fakir; yet she has driven mad and killed five women in a manner no woman can explain. I wonder if she herself is wholly human."
"If I can get within ax-throwing distance of her I'll settle that question," growled Conyn, helping herself to the governor's wine and pushing a glass toward Balthusa, who took it hesitatingly, and with an uncertain glance toward Valannus.
The governor turned toward Conyn and stared at her thoughtfully.
"The soldiers, who do not believe in ghosts or devils," she said, "are almost in a panic of fear. You, who believe in ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and all manner of uncanny things, do not seem to fear any of the things in which you believe."
"There's nothing in the universe cold steel won't cut," answered Conyn. "I threw my ax at the demon, and she took no hurt, but I might have missed in the dusk, or a branch deflected its flight. I'm not going out of my way looking for devils; but I wouldn't step out of my path to let one go by."
Valannus lifted her head and met Conyn's gaze squarely.
"Conyn, more depends on you than you realize. You know the weakness of this province--a slender wedge thrust into the untamed wilderness. You know that the lives of all the people west of the marches depend on this fort. Were it to fall, red axes would be splintering the gates of Velitrium before a horsewoman could cross the marches. Her Majesty, or her Majesty's advisers, have ignored my plea that more troops be sent to hold the frontier. They know nothing of border conditions, and are averse to expending any more money in this direction. The fate of the frontier depends upon the women who now hold it.
"You know that most of the army which conquered Conajohara has been withdrawn. You know the force left is inadequate, especially since that devil Zogara Sag managed to poison our water supply, and forty women died in one day. Many of the others are sick, or have been bitten by serpents or mauled by wild beasts which seem to swarm in increasing numbers in the vicinity of the fort. The soldiers believe Zogara's boast that she could summon the forest beasts to slay her enemies.
"I have three hundred pikemen, four hundred Bossonian archers, and perhaps fifty women who, like yourself, are skilled in woodcraft. They are worth ten times their number of soldiers, but there are so few of them. Frankly, Conyn, my situation is becoming precarious. The soldiers whisper of desertion; they are low-spirited, believing Zogara Sag has loosed devils on us. They fear the black plague with which she threatened us--the terrible black death of the swamplands. When I see a sick soldier, I sweat with fear of seeing her turn black and shrivel and die before my eyes.
"Conyn, if the plague is loosed upon us, the soldiers will desert in a body! The border will be left unguarded and nothing will check the sweep of the dark-skinned hordes to the very gates of Velitrium--maybe beyond! If we cannot hold the fort, how can they hold the town?
"Conyn, Zogara Sag must die, if we are to hold Conajohara. You have penetrated the unknown deeper than any other woman in the fort; you know where Gwawela stands, and something of the forest trails across the river. Will you take a band of women tonight and endeavor to kill or capture her? Oh, I know it's mad. There isn't more than one chance in a thousand that any of you will come back alive. But if we don't get her, it's death for us all. You can take as many women as you wish."
"A dozen women are better for a job like that than a regiment," answered Conyn. "Five hundred women couldn't fight their way to Gwawela and back, but a dozen might slip in and out again. Let me pick my women. I don't want any soldiers."
"Let me go!" eagerly exclaimed Balthusa. "I've hunted deer all my life on the Tauran."
"All right. Valannus, we'll eat at the stall where the foresters gather, and I'll pick my women. We'll start within an hour, drop down the river in a boat to a point below the village and then steal upon it through the woods. If we live, we should be back by daybreak."
Chapter 3. The Crawlers in the Dark
The river was a vague trace between walls of ebony. The paddles that propelled the long boat creeping along in the dense shadow of the eastern bank dipped softly into the water, making no more noise than the beak of a heron. The broad shoulders of the woman in front of Balthusa were a blue in the dense gloom. She knew that not even the keen eyes of the woman who knelt in the prow would discern anything more than a few feet ahead of them. Conyn was feeling her way by instinct and an intensive familiarity with the river.
No one spoke. Balthusa had had a good look at her companions in the fort before they slipped out of the stockade and down the bank into the waiting canoe. They were of a new breed growing up in the world on the raw edge of the frontier--men whom grim necessity had taught woodcraft. Aquilonians of the western provinces to a woman, they had many points in common. They dressed alike--in buckskin boots, leathern breeks and deerskin shirts, with broad girdles that held axes and short swords; and they were all gaunt and scarred and hard-eyed; sinewy and taciturn.
They were wild women, of a sort, yet there was still a wide gulf between them and the Cimmerian. They were sons of civilization, reverted to a semi-barbarism. She was a barbarian of a thousand generations of barbarians. They had acquired stealth and craft, but she had been born to these things. She excelled them even in lithe economy of motion. They were wolves, but she was a tiger.
Balthusa admired them and their leader and felt a pulse of pride that she was admitted into their company. She was proud that her paddle made no more noise than did theirs. In that respect at least she was their equal, though woodcraft learned in hunts on the Tauran could never equal that ground into the souls of women on the savage border.
Below the fort the river made a wide bend. The lights of the outpost were quickly lost, but the canoe held on its way for nearly a mile, avoiding snags and floating logs with almost uncanny precision.
Then a low grunt from their leader, and they swung its head about and glided toward the opposite shore. Emerging from the black shadows of the brush that fringed the bank and coming into the open of the midstream created a peculiar illusion of rash exposure. But the stars gave little light, and Balthusa knew that unless one were watching for it, it would be all but impossible for the keenest eye to make out the shadowy shape of the canoe crossing the river.
They swung in under the overhanging bushes of the western shore and Balthusa groped for and found a projecting root which she grasped. No word was spoken. All instructions had been given before the scouting-party left the fort. As silently as a great panther, Conyn slid over the side and vanished in the bushes. Equally noiseless, nine women followed her. To Balthusa, grasping the root with her paddle across her knee, it seemed incredible that ten women should thus fade into the tangled forest without a sound.
She settled herself to wait. No word passed between her and the other woman who had been left with her. Somewhere, a mile or so to the northwest, Zogara Sag's village stood girdled with thick woods. Balthusa understood her orders; she and her companion were to wait for the return of the raiding-party. If Conyn and her women had not returned by the first tinge of dawn, they were to race back up the river to the fort and report that the forest had again taken its immemorial toll of the invading race. The silence was oppressive. No sound came from the black woods, invisible beyond the ebony masses that were the overhanging bushes. Balthusa no longer heard the drums. They had been silent for hours. She kept blinking, unconsciously trying to see through the deep gloom. The dank night-smells of the river and the damp forest oppressed her. Somewhere, near by, there was a sound as if a big fish had flopped and splashed the water. Balthusa thought it must have leaped so close to the canoe that it had struck the side, for a slight quiver vibrated the craft. The boat's stern began to swing, slightly away from the shore. The woman behind her must have let go of the projection she was gripping. Balthusa twisted her head to hiss a warning, and could just make out the figure of her companion, a slightly blacker bulk in the blackness.
The woman did not reply. Wondering if she had fallen asleep, Balthusa reached out and grasped her shoulder. To her amazement, the woman crumpled under her touch and slumped down in the canoe. Twisting her body half about, Balthusa groped for her, her heart shooting into her throat. Her fumbling fingers slid over the woman's throat--only the youth's convulsive clenching of her jaws choked back the cry that rose to her lips. Her finger encountered a gaping, oozing wound--his companion's throat had been cut from ear to ear.
In that instant of horror and panic Balthusa started up--and then a muscular arm out of the darkness locked fiercely about her throat, strangling her yell. The canoe rocked wildly. Balthusa' knife was in her hand, though she did not remember jerking it out of her boot, and she stabbed fiercely and blindly. She felt the blade sink deep, and a fiendish yell rang in her ear, a yell that was horribly answered. The darkness seemed to come to life about her. A bestial clamor rose on all sides, and other arms grappled her. Borne under a mass of hurtling bodies the canoe rolled sidewise, but before she went under with it, something cracked against Balthusa' head and the night was briefly illuminated by a blinding burst of fire before it gave way to a blackness where not even stars shone.
Chapter 4. The Beasts of Zogara Sag
Fires dazzled Balthusa again as she slowly recovered her senses. She blinked, shook her head. Their glare hurt her eyes. A confused medley of sound rose about her, growing more distinct as her senses cleared. She lifted her head and stared stupidly about her. Black figures hemmed her in, etched against crimson tongues of flame.
Memory and understanding came in a rush. She was bound upright to a post in an open space, ringed by fierce and terrible figures. Beyond that ring fires burned, tended by naked, dark-skinned men. Beyond the fires she saw huts of mud and wattle, thatched with brush. Beyond the huts there was a stockade with a broad gate. But she saw these things only incidentally. Even the cryptic dark men with their curious coiffures were noted by her only absently. Her full attention was fixed in awful fascination on the women who stood glaring at her.
Short women, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, lean-hipped, they were naked except for scanty loin-clouts. The firelight brought out the play of their swelling muscles in bold relief. Their dark faces were immobile, but their narrow eyes glittered with the fire that burns in the eyes of a stalking tiger. Their tangled manes were bound back with bands of copper. Swords and axes were in their hands. Crude bandages banded the limbs of some, and smears of blood were dried on their dark skins. There had been fighting, recent and deadly.
Her eyes wavered away from the steady glare of her captors, and she repressed a cry of horror. A few feet away there rose a low, hideous pyramid: it was built of gory human heads. Dead eyes glared glassily up the black sky. Numbly she recognized the countenances which were turned toward her. They were the heads of the women who had followed Conyn into the forest. She could not tell if the Cimmerian's head were among them. Only a few faces were visible to her. It looked to her as if there must be ten or eleven heads at least. A deadly sickness assailed her. She fought a desire to retch. Beyond the heads lay the bodies of half a dozen Picts, and she was aware of a fierce exultation at the sight. The forest runners had taken toll, at least.
Twisting her head away from the ghastly spectacle, she became aware that another post stood near her--a stake painted black as was the one to which she was bound. A woman sagged in her bonds there, naked except for her leathern breeks, whom Balthusa recognized as one of Conyn's woodsmen. Blood trickled from her mouth, oozed sluggishly from a gash in her side. Lifting her head as she licked her livid lips, she muttered, making herself heard with difficulty above the fiendish clamor of the Picts: "So they got you, too!"
"Sneaked up in the water and cut the other fellow's throat," groaned Balthusa. "We never heard them till they were on us. Mitra, how can anything move so silently?"
"They're devils," mumbled the frontiersman. "They must have been watching us from the time we left midstream. We walked into a trap. Arrows from all sides were ripping into us before we knew it. Most of us dropped at the first fire. Three or four broke through the bushes and came to hand-grips. But there were too many. Conyn might have gotten away. I haven't seen her head. Been better for you and me if they'd killed us outright. I can't blame Conyn. Ordinarily we'd have gotten to the village without being discovered. They don't keep spies on the river bank as far down as we landed. We must have stumbled into a big party coming up the river from the south. Some devilment is up. Too many Picts here. These aren't all Gwaweli; women from the western tribes here and from up and down the river."
Balthusa stared at the ferocious shapes. Little as she knew of Pictish ways, she was aware that the number of women clustered about them was out of proportion to the size of the village. There were not enough huts to have accommodated them all. Then she noticed that there was a difference in the barbaric tribal designs painted on their faces and pectorals.
"Some kind of devilment," muttered the forest runner. "They might have gathered here to watch Zogara's magic-making. She'll make some rare magic with our carcasses. Well, a border-womenwoman doesn't expect to die in bed. But I wish we'd gone out along with the rest."
The wolfish howling of the Picts rose in volume and exultation, and from a movement in their ranks, an eager surging and crowding, Balthusa deduced that someone of importance was coming. Twisting her head about, she saw that the stakes were set before a long building, larger than the other huts, decorated by human skulls dangling from the eaves. Through the door of that structure now danced a fantastic figure.
"Zogara!" muttered the woodsman, her bloody countenance set in wolfish lines as she unconsciously strained at her cords. Balthusa saw a lean figure of middle height, almost hidden in ostrich plumes set on a harness of leather and copper. From amidst the plumes peered a hideous and malevolent face. The plumes puzzled Balthusa. She knew their source lay half the width of a world to the south. They fluttered and rustled evilly as the shaman leaped and cavorted.
With fantastic bounds and prancings she entered the ring and whirled before her bound and silent captives. With another woman it would have seemed ridiculous--a foolish savage prancing meaninglessly in a whirl of feathers. But that ferocious face glaring out from the billowing mass gave the scene a grim significance. No woman with a face like that could seem ridiculous or like anything except the devil she was.
Suddenly she froze to statuesque stillness; the plumes rippled once and sank about her. The howling warriors fell silent. Zogara Sag stood erect and motionless, and she seemed to increase in height--to grow and expand. Balthusa experienced the illusion that the Pict was towering above her, staring contemptuously down from a great height, though she knew the shaman was not as tall as herself. She shook off the illusion with difficulty.
The shaman was talking now, a harsh, guttural intonation that yet carried the hiss of a cobra. She thrust her head on her long neck toward the wounded woman on the stake; her eyes shone red as blood in the firelight. The frontiersman spat full in her face.
With a fiendish howl Zogara bounded convulsively into the air, and the warriors gave tongue to a yell that shuddered up to the stars. They rushed toward the woman on the stake, but the shaman beat them back. A snarled command sent women running to the gate. They hurled it open, turned and raced back to the circle. The ring of women split, divided with desperate haste to right and left. Balthusa saw the men and naked children scurrying to the huts. They peeked out of doors and windows. A broad lane was left to the open gate, beyond which loomed the black forest, crowding sullenly in upon the clearing, unlighted by the fires.
A tense silence reigned as Zogara Sag turned toward the forest, raised on her tiptoes and sent a weird inhuman call shuddering out into the night. Somewhere, far out in the black forest, a deeper cry answered her. Balthusa shuddered. From the timbre of that cry she knew it never came from a human throat. She remembered what Valannus had said--that Zogara boasted that she could summon wild beasts to do her bidding. The woodsman was livid beneath her mask of blood. She licked her lips spasmodically.
The village held its breath. Zogara Sag stood still as a statue, her plumes trembling faintly about her. But suddenly the gate was no longer empty.
A shuddering gasp swept over the village and women crowded hastily back, jamming one another between the huts. Balthusa felt the short hair stir on her scalp. The creature that stood in the gate was like the embodiment of nightstallion legend. Its color was of a curious pale quality which made it seem ghostly and unreal in the dim light. But there was nothing unreal about the low-hung savage head, and the great curved fangs that glistened in the firelight. On noiseless padded feet it approached like a phantom out of the past. It was a survival of an older, grimmer age, the ogre of many an ancient legend--a saber-tooth tiger. No Hyborian hunter had looked upon one of those primordial brutes for centuries. Immemorial myths lent the creatures a supernatural quality, induced by their ghostly color and their fiendish ferocity.
The beast that glided toward the women on the stakes was longer and heavier than a common, striped tiger, almost as bulky as a bear. Its shoulders and forelegs were so massive and mightily muscled as to give it a curiously top-heavy look, though its hindquarters were more powerful than that of a lion. Its jaws were massive, but its head was brutishly shaped. Its brain capacity was small. It had room for no instincts except those of destruction. It was a freak of carnivorous development, evolution run amuck in a horror of fangs and talons.
This was the monstrosity Zogara Sag had summoned out of the forest. Balthusa no longer doubted the actuality of the shaman's magic. Only the black arts could establish a domination over that tiny-brained, mighty-thewed monster. Like a whisper at the back of her consciousness rose the vague memory of the name of an ancient god of darkness and primordial fear, to whom once both women and beasts bowed and whose children--men whispered--still lurked in dark corners of the world. New horror tinged the glare she fixed on Zogara Sag.
The monster moved past the heap of bodies and the pile of gory heads without appearing to notice them. She was no scavenger. She hunted only the living, in a life dedicated solely to slaughter. An awful hunger burned greenly in the wide, unwinking eyes; the hunger not alone of belly-emptiness, but the lust of death-dealing. Her gaping jaws slavered. The shaman stepped back, her hand waved toward the woodsman.
The great cat sank into a crouch, and Balthusa numbly remembered tales of its appalling ferocity: of how it would spring upon an elephant and drive its sword-like fangs so deeply into the titan's skull that they could never be withdrawn, but would keep it nailed to its victim, to die by starvation. The shaman cried out shrilly, and with an ear-shattering roar the monster sprang.
Balthusa had never dreamed of such a spring, such a hurtling of incarnated destruction embodied in that giant bulk of iron thews and ripping talons. Full on the woodsman's breast it struck, and the stake splintered and snapped at the base, crashing to the earth under the impact. Then the saber-tooth was gliding toward the gate, half dragging, half carrying a hideous crimson hulk that only faintly resembled a woman. Balthusa glared almost paralyzed, her brain refusing to credit what her eyes had seen.
In that leap the great beast had not only broken off the stake, it had ripped the mangled body of its victim from the post to which it was bound. The huge talons in that instant of contact had disemboweled and partially dismembered the woman, and the giant fangs had torn away the whole top of her head, shearing through the skull as easily as through flesh. Stout rawhide thongs had given way like paper; where the thongs had held, flesh and bones had not. Balthusa retched suddenly. She had hunted bears and panthers, but she had never dreamed the beast lived which could make such a red ruin of a human frame in the flicker of an instant.
The saber-tooth vanished through the gate, and a few moments later a deep roar sounded through the forest, receding in the distance. But the Picts still shrank back against the huts, and the shaman still stood facing the gate that was like a black opening to let in the night.
Cold sweat burst suddenly out on Balthusa' skin. What new horror would come through that gate to make carrion-meat of her body? Sick panic assailed her and she strained futilely at her thongs. The night pressed in very black and horrible outside the firelight. The fires themselves glowed lurid as the fires of Hell. She felt the eyes of the Picts upon her--hundreds of hungry, cruel eyes that reflected the lust of souls utterly without humanity as she knew it. They no longer seemed women; they were devils of this black jungle, as inhuman as the creatures to which the fiend in the nodding plumes screamed through the darkness.
Zogara sent another call shuddering through the night, and it was utterly unlike the first cry. There was a hideous sibilance in it--Balthusa turned cold at the implication. If a serpent could hiss that loud, it would make just such a sound.
This time there was no answer--only a period of breathless silence in which the pound of Balthusa' heart strangled her; and then there sounded a swishing outside the gate, a dry rustling that sent chills down Balthusa' spine. Again the firelit gate held a hideous occupant.
Again Balthusa recognized the monster from ancient legends. She saw and knew the ancient and evil serpent which swayed there, its wedge-shaped head, huge as that of a horse, as high as a tall woman's head, and its palely gleaming barrel rippling out behind it. A forked tongue darted in and out, and the firelight glittered on bared fangs.
Balthusa became incapable of emotion. The horror of her fate paralyzed her. That was the reptile that the ancients called Ghost Snake, the pale, abominable terror that of old glided into huts by night to devour whole families. Like the python it crushed its victim, but unlike other constrictors its fangs bore venom that carried madness and death. It too had long been considered extinct. But Valannus had spoken truly. No white woman knew what shapes haunted the great forests beyond Black River.
It came on silently, rippling over the ground, its hideous head on the same level, its neck curving back slightly for the strike. Balthusa gazed with a glazed, hypnotized stare into that loathsome gullet down which she would soon be engulfed, and she was aware of no sensation except a vague nausea.
And then something that glinted in the firelight streaked from the shadows of the huts, and the great reptile whipped about and went into instant convulsions. As in a dream Balthusa saw a short throwing-spear transfixing the mighty neck, just below the gaping jaws; the shaft protruded from one side, the steel head from the other.
Knotting and looping hideously, the maddened reptile rolled into the circle of women who stove back from her. The spear had not severed its spine, but merely transfixed its great neck muscles. Its furiously lashing tail mowed down a dozen women and its jaws snapped convulsively, splashing others with venom that burned like liquid fire. Howling, cursing, screaming, frantic, they scattered before it, knocking each other down in their flight, trampling the fallen, bursting through the huts. The giant snake rolled into a fire, scattering sparks and brands, and the pain lashed it to more frenzied efforts. A hut wall buckled under the ram-like impact of its flailing tail, disgorging howling people.
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